Week 4: FCO/British Council - A Valuable PD Measurement Model

I found this week’s article from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and British Council particularly interesting, and perhaps the most in line with what I would recommend for measurement and evaluation techniques as it relates to PD. As monitoring and evaluating any field is important, to better understand policy/programming progression, and determine impact and change, it is equally important to ensure that the evaluation model is appropriate to the task at hand. I want to highlight a few reasons I think the FCO/British Council pilot framework may be on track to provide the most valuable insight for measuring PD.

The Framework is grounded. By saying the FCO/British Council framework is grounded I am suggesting that the framework has considered both long term and ongoing evaluation challenges.

·         Long Term. FCO/British Council stated they took into consideration the persistent nature of PD when building their model. Tim Banfield’s stated “Public diplomacy is about building relationships between diverse nations and cultures, and these are constantly influenced by many external factors. And because the full effect of the council activities may only because evident after long periods, its changing impact is very difficult to measure year to year.”

·         Evidence Based Model. To ensure their framework was responsive throughout the period of measurement, FCO/British Council created an evidence based model. As an evidence based model, FCO/British Council will be looking for the standard set of long-term outcomes, intermediate outcomes, outputs, activities and inputs – all of which feed an ultimate goal. With an evidence based model, depending on outputs, outcomes can shift over the course of measuring.  FCO/British Council discuss this as intangibility.

Innovation. The FCO/British Council model appears to have successfully integrated three innovative evaluation tools to measure impact. These tools will measure more short-term, however over extended periods of time could inform PD policy. I particularly interested in the influence tracker and believe that this tracker, while potentially the most challenging to measure, could have the most significant impact on PD programming.

In the end, what makes this framework so valuable is that it is evidence based, with additional innovative trackers to distinguish this model from other traditional development models. It will be interesting to see if the pilots areas expand and if the impact is what is expected.